A Woven Wicker Basket and the Defiance of a Telescope

On Worship and Gathering Light

Telescopes are tools for the gathering of light. As a woven wicker basket collects wildflowers, or a pail fills with blueberries, telescopes participate in the harvest of hidden fruit from the foliage of the sky.

The need for these tools is, perhaps, obvious. At first blush the sky appears dark and impenetrable — void of sweetness or beauty. The gathering of photons scattered among a night darkened by background noise and overgrown with artificial light requires the sharpest of tools — and long, effortful work.

Also, perhaps, obvious: when I dare look out at our world, darkened by pain and overgrown with artificial pleasure, it is easy to get discouraged in my quest for light. To see nothing but darkness, void of sweetness or beauty.

Yet my telescope helps me to look again. Put on my gloves, step into the field, push past the thorny scrub. Keep picking.

“The work of worship,” writes Eugene Peterson, “gathers everything… that has been dispersed… that has been forgotten in our distracted hurrying.”

A telescope is effective, in part, because it increases the collecting area of our eyes. Like a pupil dilated to many inches, or even meters, it amasses faint, isolated photons into a great congregated light. I might think of it like this: a telescope casts a wide net. Like fishermen with larger and larger nets, the greater the size of the collecting mirror, the greater the shining catch.

“The Kingdom of Heaven is like a fishing net,” taught Jesus of Nazareth. “Thrown into deep water [it] catches fish of every kind.”

But a large mirror isn’t itself enough to overcome the noise. Collecting light, it turns out, requires time. Our eyes, designed for speedy reaction to predators, refresh more than 15 times a second, and remain lubricated through rapid and constant blinking, open and shut.

Thank goodness, then, for telescopes. Their shutters held open, they stare for minutes, hours, even days or weeks. Unblinking, they access the whispers of the universe. Said again: telescopes overcome our impatience — only in extended exposures do the most distant galaxies appear.

“All this does not take place merely in a single hour,” writes Peterson. Truly, even one of Jesus’s closest disciples, Simon Peter, toiled all night with his nets held wide, and caught nothing. Yet he obediently put them in the water again. In returning, the nets became full.

What is worship but the defiant act of gathering together people, events, thoughts — glimpses of beauty — into a focused reality through which and because of which we can’t help but sing?

With my telescope the lesson slowly sinks in: darkness is an indicator of unseen light, a dispersed and scattered beauty which requires patient accumulation to see. In persistent gathering, in daring to engage our mirrors with the intimidating darkness, we might overcome the noise of our distracted hurrying. “Faithfully repeated, week after week, year after year,” writes Peterson, “there is an accumulation to wholeness.”

The Christian scriptures culminate in a prophetic vision of Eden restored, confusing and metaphorical, yes, but also full of gathered light. “Worshiping, they’ll look on His face, their foreheads mirroring God,” records Revelation 22. “Never again will there be any night.”